Latest / Overwhelmed Working Woman: Boost Productivity, Master Time Management, Overcome Overwhelm & Stop People Pleasing / #290| The One Question That Tells You If You're Dealing With Stress or Real Overwhelm
Transcript
- 0:00Michelle Gauthier: When you listen today, you'll learn the one question that tells you if you're dealing with stress or real overwhelm.
- 0:06Michelle Gauthier: You're listening to Overwhelmed Working Woman, the podcast that helps you be more calm and more productive by doing less.
- 0:17Michelle Gauthier: I'm your host, Michelle Gauthier, a former Overwhelmed Working Woman and current life coach.
- 0:22Michelle Gauthier: On this show, we unpack the stress and pressure that today's Working Woman experiences.
- 0:27Michelle Gauthier: And in each episode, you'll get a strategy to bring more calm, ease, and relaxation to your life.
- 0:34Michelle Gauthier: Hi, friend.
- 0:38Michelle Gauthier: Thanks for joining today.
- 0:39Michelle Gauthier: Today we're going to talk about the difference and similarities between stress and overwhelm.
- 0:45Michelle Gauthier: Here's why this actually matters.
- 0:47Michelle Gauthier: I learned this concept from the book that I have reviewed on here, Brene Brown's Atlas of the Heart, that gives a definition for every feeling.
- 0:54Michelle Gauthier: Okay, maybe not every feeling, but most of the main feelings.
- 0:57Michelle Gauthier: And the point of that book, which I totally agree with, is if you can identify the feeling that you're in, you can understand yourself better and take the right action based on the feeling that you're having.
- 1:08Michelle Gauthier: Stress and overwhelm often get synced together, or we may talk about them at the same time.
- 1:14Michelle Gauthier: Regarding my coaching, I talk about them as two separate things, but they can feel really similar in the moment.
- 1:19Michelle Gauthier: When you listen today, you'll learn the real difference between stress and overwhelm and why one of them can be helpful, why the tools that work on stress don't work on overwhelm, no matter how hard you try.
- 1:30Michelle Gauthier: And one quick question you can ask yourself to know exactly which one you're dealing with.
- 1:35Michelle Gauthier: Okay, so let's talk first about stress.
- 1:37Michelle Gauthier: Stress is your body's reaction to a change or a challenge.
- 1:41Michelle Gauthier: And stress isn't automatically bad.
- 1:43Michelle Gauthier: For example, if I look at my day today, I had a class that I taught, and that was a stressor, but the stress helped me be really prepared for it and spend a long time putting together a class that I felt was really good.
- 1:57Michelle Gauthier: And I felt a little stressed because I had a lot of work to finish up, and I also had to pick my daughter up at 4:15 from her golf practice.
- 2:04Michelle Gauthier: That stress helped me work efficiently and made sure that I left the house on time.
- 2:10Michelle Gauthier: So stress can be helpful and even motivating.
- 2:14Michelle Gauthier: Overwhelm is what happens when multiple stressors pile up faster than you can process or recover from them.
- 2:21Michelle Gauthier: It's not the one class or presentation, it's the presentation.
- 2:24Michelle Gauthier: Plus, your kid is struggling at school, plus you're hosting company this weekend, plus you're behind on something else at work, plus your house is a mess.
- 2:32Michelle Gauthier: And none of those are single isolated stressors anymore.
- 2:36Michelle Gauthier: They're stacking on each other, and that's what turns ordinary stress into overwhelm.
- 2:41Michelle Gauthier: That distinction changes the way that you should think about it and what you should do because stress responds to pushing through.
- 2:48Michelle Gauthier: Stress is helpful when you're trying to push through and get something done.
- 2:51Michelle Gauthier: You can feel stressed about that presentation and still nail it.
- 2:54Michelle Gauthier: The stress doesn't stop you, it just makes you feel it.
- 2:57Michelle Gauthier: Overwhelm doesn't work that way.
- 2:59Michelle Gauthier: You really can't just push through overwhelm the way you push through stress because there's no single thing to push through.
- 3:05Michelle Gauthier: It's not one obstacle in front of you.
- 3:07Michelle Gauthier: It's five things pressing in from every direction at once.
- 3:10Michelle Gauthier: And when you feel overwhelmed, your brain is usually very fuzzy.
- 3:14Michelle Gauthier: Mine always feels like it's spinning.
- 3:16Michelle Gauthier: And so it's very hard to have clear thoughts and make a good plan about what to do next.
- 3:22Michelle Gauthier: When you try to power through overwhelm, what my clients most often report is when they have felt overwhelmed for a week that they have gotten nothing done because they can't think clearly and make a plan and take action on something like you can when you have a stressor.
- 3:37Michelle Gauthier: If you have the feeling of stress, you might go looking for stress solutions.
- 3:41Michelle Gauthier: You could have another cup of coffee or tell yourself to just focus and stay up a little bit later to get through your list.
- 3:47Michelle Gauthier: But there really is no powering through overwhelm like you can do with a single stressor.
- 3:54Michelle Gauthier: A great question to ask yourself to try to decide which one you're actually in is is this one thing or is this multiple things?
- 4:01Michelle Gauthier: And if it's one thing and you have stress about that one thing, a little pressure might even help you rise to it and get it done.
- 4:08Michelle Gauthier: If it's a whole bunch of things landing on you at once and you can't tell which one to tackle first, that's overwhelm.
- 4:13Michelle Gauthier: And no amount of pushing through is going to fix that.
- 4:16Michelle Gauthier: The fix isn't more effort, it's fewer things piling up.
- 4:19Michelle Gauthier: I picture it like if a stress is somebody setting a piece of paper on your desk, that's a to-do.
- 4:25Michelle Gauthier: Overwhelm is having like 16 pieces of paper flying at your desk and you can't read them fast enough to decide what to do with them and pass them on.
- 4:32Michelle Gauthier: So if you realize from asking yourself, is this one thing or is this five things?
- 4:37Michelle Gauthier: And I can't process those five things quickly enough to handle them, you're probably in overwhelm.
- 4:42Michelle Gauthier: And if that's the case, it's good to just tell yourself, okay, I know what this is.
- 4:46Michelle Gauthier: This is overwhelm.
- 4:47Michelle Gauthier: And pushing through overwhelm does not work.
- 4:50Michelle Gauthier: One when you're in overwhelm is to gently get yourself out of that overwhelm so that you can begin to work on one thing at a time.
- 4:58Michelle Gauthier: A thought that helps me make that transition is I'm going to figure out the very next thing that I need to do.
- 5:05Michelle Gauthier: And if I'm too overwhelmed to figure out what that thing is, I just pick any of them.
- 5:09Michelle Gauthier: So in my example, I said 16 different people put a task on your desk, just grab one of them and say, okay, this is where I'm going to start.
- 5:16Michelle Gauthier: And when you can get back into that kind of energy, then you're able to have clear thinking.
- 5:22Michelle Gauthier: Other ideas that you could do is you could get up and take a walk and try to reset your brain, just walk away from the situation for a little while.
- 5:29Michelle Gauthier: But when you diagnose yourself as being in overwhelm, the first thing to do is to shift into a different feeling because you can't make forward progress when you're in overwhelm.
- 5:39Michelle Gauthier: If you found yourself nodding along to this episode and thinking, yeah, that's been happening to me, I'd love to help you figure out exactly what's piling up and how to bring it back down to a realistic level that you can deal with.
- 5:50Michelle Gauthier: You can head to the link in the show notes to set up a free discovery session with me to learn about one on one coaching.
- 5:56Michelle Gauthier: I would love to talk to you.
- 5:58Michelle Gauthier: Thank you for listening to the Overwhelmed Working Woman podcast.
- 6:05Michelle Gauthier: If you want to learn more about my work, head over to my website at MichelleGauthier.com.
- 6:11Michelle Gauthier: See you next week.